This invention relates to specimen or tissue cassettes and, more particularly, to a multi-compartment tissue cassette suitable for holding two (or more) samples simultaneously in their own respective compartments.
Thin tissue samples taken during biopsies are commonly stored in small plastic containers or cassettes. These cassettes are used to hold the tissue samples during processing, until the samples are removed for testing or examining.
It is common for the cassettes to be placed in a histological tissue processing chamber. The chamber is designed to heat the tissue sample, and expose the sample to various chemical treatments (e.g., alcohols, xylene and formaldehydes) in order to preserve the sample. The sample is then embedded in paraffin wax in the cassette. The embedded samples are then removed from the cassettes, so that they can be sliced into thin sections for subsequent examination.
Tissue cassettes are well-known in the art; see for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,034,884; 4,220,252; 4,421,246; 4,549,670; 5,127,537; and 5,533,642. Some of the first cassettes were manufactured from steel. Today, most cassettes are molded from plastics.
The present invention is a multi-compartmented tissue cassette. In the preferred embodiment, there are two compartments, one smaller than the other. The subject tissue cassette can hold a relatively small sample in the smaller of the two compartments and a larger sample in the larger of the two compartments. The two samples are physically isolated from each other but can be treated simultaneously. Also, in a preferred embodiment the perforations associated with the smaller compartment may be of different dimensions depending on the size of the tissue samples to be held in the various compartments.